A laser scanner collects data about its surroundings by collecting thousands, millions or even billions of data points of three-dimensional position information. One innovative laser scanner system for collecting such data points is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,988,862, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Other systems meeting this description include the Leica HDS6000 laser scanner from Leica Geosystems HDS, LLC, of San Ramon, Calif., or other LIDAR systems-such as the airborne LIDAR system disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/397,246 filed Apr. 4, 2006, and incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. The data points, which together are called a point cloud when viewed on or manipulated by a computer, can be collected so densely that they effectively re-create a scene like a photograph. This allows laser scanner users to use the point clouds to view scenes and collect measurements from the point cloud.
The collected point cloud is typically stored in a data store, which is accessible to software packages that render the point cloud viewable on a computer. That is, the software packages recreate the scanned scenes on the computer screen so that the user may view the scanned scene. Some software packages allow the user to manipulate the scanned image as desired.
However, a point cloud is often comprised on multiple scans from different locations or viewpoints that have then been combined in a single coordinate system. When such a point cloud is then rendered as an image by the software packages, the resulting image may be very difficult for the user to understand or interpret. This is often because the resulting image includes elements from several points of view. Said another way, scanned elements that would be occluded from view if the point cloud only included data points taken at a first point of view or location are included in the rendered image as the image includes data points from multiple additional points of view or locations. The scans at the additional view points or locations include the elements occluded from the first view or location. For example, a rendered image may show distant points in between closer points since there is not a surface to occlude the more distant points. As may be appreciated, this may confuse the user who is viewing the scene.